Kate McKinnon: 2016’s New Queen Of Comedy

Popular opinion holds that 2016 has been an altogether horrible, no good, absolutely crummy, trash monster of a year. But I would contend that one good thing has happened this year: Kate McKinnon became the new queen of comedy.

Now there isn’t “one” true queen of comedy. This isn’t a title that one woman can hold and all others must grapple each other for. We have a lot of “queens” in comedy right now: Amy Schumer, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, etc, etc, etc… There are a lot of funny women working right now! Still I think 2016 belongs to McKinnon. This was the year that McKinnon not only came into her full strength as a comedian, but where her performances spoke to something major in the pop cultural zeitgeist. She appeared in no less than five films this year (co-starred in Ghostbusters, Masterminds, Office Christmas Party, and delivered vocal performances in The Angry Birds Movie and Finding Dory) and she portrayed Hilary Clinton on the nation’s most popular sketch comedy show during one of the most fraught moments in our history. Simply put: Kate McKinnon broke out this year.

But let’s dig into the controversy around Ghostbusters, shall we? When director Paul Feig declared that the reboot would feature an all-female cast, many fans imploded without having seen the final product. The film is a pleasant enough action comedy that shares the spirit of the original. The film reunited Bridesmaids stars Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy and put a spotlight on Saturday Night Live‘s Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon. Both Jones and McKinnon did fabulous jobs, but McKinnon pretty much stole the entire film. Her character, Dr. Jillian Holtzmann, was something audiences hadn’t seen before. She’s a truly bizarre, sort of steampunk, genderqueer, equipment-obsessed science nerd who deals out equal amounts of sarcasm and badassery. The highlight of the film? Holtzmann’s delirious attack on a legion of ghosts in Times Square. She literally licks one of the “guns” she’s constructed like it’s a treat and tears into combat. It’s gleeful and ridiculous. She’s practically a rock star! It’s great. She’s not a character who apologizes for being herself, and in the context of the casting controversy, that makes the performance all the more powerful.

However, McKinnon didn’t just transform into a movie star this year; She became our best sketch comedy performer. McKinnon became the fourth performer in SNL history to take home an Emmy for her work. To give you some context for why that’s such a big deal, Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, and Dana Carvey were the other three winners. McKinnon frequently delivers killer performances week after week, playing through the scale of her comedic skills on any given show, but this year she gave us the definitive Hillary Clinton impression.

No matter what you think of Clinton herself, you have to admit that McKinnon’s impression is brilliant. While Amy Poehler locked into Clinton’s stiffness, McKinnon zeroed in on her other-worldly ambition. It’s the quality that propelled Clinton to the top of the Democratic Party ticket and also ultimately forged a barrier between her and many voters. McKinnon tore into Clinton with the fervor of a classically-trained actor finally getting his chance at Hamlet. She played her as the put upon rival, the triumphant debater, and eventually, as the brokenhearted.

So yeah, this year has been brutal — and it’s not over yet — but neither is McKinnon. She has two more Saturday Night Lives before 2017 and just signed on for her first starring role in a feature, an adaptation of The Lunch Witch. Kate McKinnon is this year’s comedy champion.